Walter Fletcher (politician)

Born Walter Fleischl von Marxow, he was the second son of Paul Fleischl von Marxow and his wife Cecile (née Levis)[4] of Shagbrooke, Reigate, Surrey.[3][5] His father was an Austrian-born woolbroker, brother of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who became a naturalised British citizen in 1887.[6]

Following education at Charterhouse School and the University of Lausanne, he began training as a manager in the rubber industry.[3]

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he entered the British Army, obtaining a commission in the Army Ordnance Department. He served in East Africa, and by the end of the war in 1918 had reached the rank of major.[3]

In September 1919 he changed his name by deed poll to Walter Fletcher.[7] He returned to Africa where he managed a large number of rubber plantations. He returned to England where he subsequently became chairman and managing director of Hecht, Levis and Kahn, a major rubber and commodities company. He held the position for thirty years.[3] In 1928 he married Esme Boyd.[3]

In late 1940, Fletcher approached the Special Operations Executive and offers them his speciality, he eventually assigned to the Force 136 and running an operation called Operation Remorse.[1] Originally it was hoped Fletcher could use his contacts to smuggle rubber out of Japanese-occupied Malaya and Indo-China through the Chinese black market. The operation was diversified to include the smuggling of foreign currency, diamonds and machinery to fund the SOE's activities.[8][9]

Colin Mackenzie, the head of Force 136 (SOE in the Far East), said of Fletcher, “He did it very well… even in the early days I had £20,000 of diamonds across my desk in one go. One estimate is that the net profit was worth £77 million.”[10] Mackenzie also commented:

Walter was gloriously fat. It was rumoured that he won the hundred yards at Charterhouse when he was nineteen stone. I didn’t believe it, but when I saw him running for a bus when he was still nineteen stone I began to believe it might be true.

In 1947 Fletcher was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his war service.[3]